Indigenous Leaders and Peruvian National Policy Making in Puno, 1900–30

By the late 1920s, Puno’s peasant movement, helped by the crisis of the wool market, had managed to stop land usurpations by both local hacienda owners and wool merchants.  The peasant communities had achieved this victory mostly through organized resistance and by building connections with President Augusto B. Leguía (1919-1930) and the national bureaucracy in Lima.  In a largely indigenous “departamento” bordering with Bolivia, rural intellectuals deprived of political power (due to literacy requirements excluding peasants from voting) developed a wide range of political and rhetorical strategies to safeguard their lands and partial autonomy.  They produced a project of ethnic citizenship that conveyed a discourse of national integration Peruvian elites could not elaborate.  Though this project was supported and even espoused by “Puneño” mestizo (mixed-blood) intellectuals, it did not prosper.  Neither mestizo intellectuals nor elites could identify or connect with indigenous perspectives or expectations.  Indigenous leaders helped hinder this project by returning once and again to an ambivalent discourse shifting between victimization and aggressiveness.  Paternalism and patrimonialism prevented Puno’s leaders from establishing a lasting political representation beyond the local level.